I would really like a bit more details on how ANet think this would work.
Will the ranking be connected to the alliances?
If true, how will the matchmaking work?
I assume each one of the first 3 alliances will go to a different servers and the process will repeat until the servers are “full”, with the option of having more alliances in one server if some alliances are smaller than the others:
- Red server has just one big alliance for a total of 2000 players;
- Green server has 3 alliances for a total of 2000 players;
- Blue server has 6 different alliances for a total of 2000 players.
If that’s the case, the Red server would probably have the upper hand because has better coordination between his 2000 players and this would mean that all alliances will try to “stack up” exactly as the servers are stacked at the moment and nothing would change.
Also: will the matchmaking consider coverage during the alliance selection? Let’s say there’s one alliance of American players playing on EU servers. Will the alliance have priority to join a server that lacks coverage in that timezone?
The risk is, again, that the most serious alliances would try to have the full coverage for all timezones, ending up with “stacked” alliances.
Another consideration I would make is about the size of the guilds participating in one alliance. Let’s say alliance A has only 4 big (400+ members) “PvX” guilds, while alliance B has 10-12 WvW guilds that tend to run in small organized groups. Will the matchmaking algorithm try to avoid the “blob vs small organized group” situation? If not, then not only the alliances will be “stacked”, but the guilds will try to be “stacked” aswell.
I really hope ANet will consider that the servers will need to strike a balance between combat groups (organized guilds, etc), “militia” (semi-organized), scouts and defenders and that’s not easily achieved with a “random” or “rank based” matchmaking algorithm.
The only scenario in which a server can achieve that balance is with a full capacity alliance that organizes internally to have guilds and players taking care of each role, but that would be very hard to balance when you need to put that alliance against two smaller alliances that may or may not provide the same coverage in all roles.
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). I don’t feel the mantra heal is good enough for my playstyle in zergs, I would rather have a bigger heal with fast cast time every 20s for when I screw up than two small heals with a cooldown in the middle, just a matter of taste